Habits

Control of Responses Changes with Repetition

There are currently three perspectives on the habit mechanisms that generate repeated behavior in everyday life. Observations of college students and adults in the community suggest that about 45% of everyday behavior is repeated almost daily and usually in the same context.

In a direct context cuing account, repeated coactivation forges direct links in memory between context and response representations. Once these links are formed, merely perceiving a context can trigger associated responses. Supporting evidence comes from research in which the mere activation of a construct, such as the elderly stereotype, leads to the activation of associated behaviors, such as physical infirmity, that manifests in actual performance.

It is not yet clear whether contexts trigger responses through such a simple mechanism in the absence of a relevant goal. Social cognition research has thus far demonstrated a limited version of direct cuing effects. Although research has yet to demonstrate that such [Page 408]activation can initiate responses, the possibility that action can be directly cued by contexts in the absence of goal activation is suggested by myriad findings in cognitive neuroscience revealing reduced involvement of goal-related neural structures, such as the prefrontal cortex, when behaviors have come under habitual control. Furthermore, evidence from animal learning research using a clever paradigm in which reinforcers are devalued is also commonly interpreted as indicating the direct context control of habits. When rats initially perform an instrumental behavior (e.g., pressing a bar to receive a food pellet), they appear motivated by specific goal expectations; they cease the behavior if the reward is devalued (e.g., by pairing it with a toxin). In contrast, when rats repeat the behavior sufficiently to form habits, they appear motivated directly by the performance context: They continue the behavior despite reward devaluation. Animal learning research shows that repeated responding is not oriented to attaining specific goals.

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